“What the Kennedys are to politics, the less-famous Craigheads are to nature—a prolific and accomplished clan.” Kirkus Reviews
Volume V, No. 4 -- SUMMER 2020
President's Message John Coyle
T R A I L R O A D
Stories about wild animals -- usually cuddly ones. Preserving our natural wonders. Teaching children to enjoy and appreciate nature. These are the topics you usually read about here in this column. Those are indeed a large part of Craighead House's mission. But let's consider a less publicized part of our mission,local history.
Just after the Civil War, when water wheels powered mills and wood, the first renewable fuel, was yielding to coal, the South Mountain Railroad was chartered. Ferrying freight and passengers between busy Pine Grove Ironworks and the metropolis of Carlisle, trains crossed a stream and a dirt road at a prized industrial village called Craigheads. Here newlyweds Charles and Agnes Craighead built their home in 1886.
After the Craighead preachers and farmers who first settled in Cumberland County, and before the Craighead Naturalists, there emerged the Craighead merchants and businessmen. Charles was the Stationmaster in a small office inside their water-powered mill just east across the tracks from today's Craighead House. The mill and tracks are long gone, leaving only the rail bed, an imitation train station, photographs and memories. But grieve not!
YOU can soon be among the first in nearly fifty years to experience a trip along the route of the South Mountain Railroad!
See information elsewhere in this issue about a possible late summer excursion from Bonnybrook Station to Craigheads, thanks in part to the efforts of the Central Pennsylvania Conservancy and their generous partners. No train though. Wear your walking shoes!
Travelers Paul E. and Alice Kathleen Heffelfinger, standing at the passenger shelter near Paul’s family home; early 1940s.
The Craighead homestead witnessed over a century of train travel and commerce. Below: Riders pose on a former NY Elevated RR Locomotive at Pine Gove. The car behind says Hunters Run and Slate Belt, stops on that spur line connected to the South Mtn. RR, later known as the Gettysburg & Harrisburg RR. (credit Randy Watts, CCHS)
Above, map of the Gettysburg & Harrrisburg RR routes, successor to the South Mtn. Railroad, circa 1885.
Below, the Reading engine No. 471, returns from Carlisle and clears Craighead Station (not seen but present day's Diehl's Feed Mill is) as it heads westward to H&P Juntn, aka Harrisburg&Potomac Junction, also called Carlisle Junction. February, 1966. Photo by Jim Bradley. Gettysburg Junction in Carlisle was located in present day Estep Electric buidling.
Rail Trail to Craighead?
Plans are afoot -- pun intended -- to expand the existing Letort Nature Trail beyond its current path from Carlisle to Spring Garden Street in South Middleton Township. This new effort of the Central Pennsylvania Conservancy will extend the trail to the south as far as Heiser's Lane, following the original right-of-way of the South Mountain Railroad across lands of Wendell Eberly and Glenn Peffer. The dimensions and surface of the new extension will be similar to the existing trail. (See map below.)
This new portion of the trail has been largely established, and by fall, it is hoped that further development will extend the trail all the way to the site of the former Craighead Station. The mill containing that station is gone. But, in a nod to history, last year a very practical depiction of a railroad station became the latest convenience-oriented addition to the Craighead House site. Future activity may see the trail complete the journey of the old rail line to Mt. Holly Springs. There is work to do before that happens.
The vision and hard work of the Central Pennsylvania Conservancy and their private and public partners is to be commended. This new recreational feature will surely please the Craighead Naturalists and offer local families an enjoyable walk, as well as a comfortable stop by the Yellow Breeches Creek.
Heather and Jim Champion
with the Craigheads Part II
Fearing Germany’s war plans, in 1940 Oxford University sent 125 children of their faculty and 25 mothers to America for safety. About 50 children and nine mothers came to Haverford, PA, sponsored by Swarthmore College. Siblings Heather and Jim Champion were among them and joined the Marshall family, friends of the Craigheads. The following is Part II of memories of their stay from the granddaughter of the hosting Marshall family.
After about a year in America, Heather and Mary Marshall went to a summer camp on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. Camp Rigs O’ Marlow offered swimming, hiking, and sailing. But of course Heather’s favorite part was the horses. Writing to my grandparents on August 7, 1941, she said:
… the days have simply flown what with riding every day and sometimes twice a day…One of my jobs is going out to the stable every morning and saddling and bridling all of the horses—that is my favorite job. I also have two ponies to look after, Bobby a black and white ex-circus pony, and Friday, a small paint that I do with Mary. My other job with the horses (along with Mary) is putting castor oil on warts on two horses’ noses. The stink is positively foul. … As you know there are two colts here, they are lovely and one of them is always getting loose. Also there is a beeeeeoooootifullllll roan mare here that is just being broken in, it is what I imagine when someone mentions mustang.
I love this letter of Heather’s, warts and all. It’s long and chatty and filled with details, and I recognize in it the correspondent she would be as an adult. From the mid-1980s to more recent times I was the lucky recipient of long, entertaining airmail letters from her. Most began with a cheerful announcement of whether she’d been “visited by The Muse” or not. If the Muse was with her I was in for a good, long, read.
My husband and I stayed with Heather and her husband, John Ashton, repeatedly in 1984. While traveling on a shoestring through Europe and the British Isles, we used their wonderful, Edwardian Era house in Newcastle-upon-Tyne as our base camp. At their kitchen table, warmed by the Aga stove and pots of tea, we compared notes on my blood relatives, and I got a sense of Heather’s way of seeing the world with a writer’s eye.
My clearest memory of Jim Champion is also my first. In 1968, the summer I turned 13, he brought his family for a stay with “Obi,” as we called my widowed grandmother.
She lived in a cottage on what had been a gentleman’s estate but was now more of a children’s paradise. My grandparents had bought the property as a fixer-upper in 1946, the year Mary and Heather graduated from Swarthmore High School. This was in the rolling hills of Chester County, near Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Summers were magical in this spot we called The Green Forest. My parents, my four siblings, and I lived next door to Obi in an enormous Victorian house.
Jim had long outgrown his silent adolescence and was a charming fellow with Old World manners. The kind of guy who showed up with a bouquet of flowers for Obi, or planted a hundred bulbs in her garden as a promise of future flowers.
In 1968 we all got to witness Jim’s love of painting. Stretching out on the lawn with a set of watercolors and a pad of paper, he performed what looked like magic to me, effortlessly producing a portrait of our green-stone house and the gorgeous old trees around it. At age 14, Jim Champion added two pouncing cats to Eugene Craighead's artwork around the kitchen stovepipe hole. His artwork didn't end there ...
Jim also left a masterpiece of caricature in our guestbook (see next panel below). His drawing shows more than a dozen immediately recognizable Champions, Marshalls, and dogs around our swimming pool. Jim’s elegant wife Molly is shown chatting with my mother in the shade. His teenage daughter Sally catches some rays, and is about to catch a splash as my 11-year-old sister Heather leaps off the diving board. I’m shown timidly deciding whether to stick a toe in the water. Jim drew himself broad-shouldered and beaming at the pool’s edge, with his 8-year-old son David bouncing at his side. My grandmother, seated a few feet away on the pool steps, basks in this sunny moment, 28 years after the summer day Jim and Heather first arrived during more stressful times.About the author: Delia Marshall and her husband, Walter Booth, live in Somerville, Massachusetts. Whenever they can, they visit Delia’s stepmother, Pat Marshall, who still lives at the Green Forest, near the house Delia grew up in. Pat has fond memories of staying with Jim and Molly Champion in London, and she carried on a true-blue, trans-Atlantic friendship with Dr. Heather Champion Ashton to the very end of her life in September, 2019. (See link below)
Jim Champion's sketch of the Green Forest pool filled with Marshalls and Champions, cira 1968.
Berry Leather (“Wonderful”, said Jean.)
Take thoroughly ripe strawberries, raspberries or blackberries and mash into a pulp. Press through sieve to remove seeds. Spread on a cookie sheet and dry in the sun or oven. When dry, dust with powdered sugar and roll like a jelly roll. Store in tin boxes and jars (today we might choose Tupperware) and use as a candy treat or in pies, sauces and tarts. Dried Berries
Spread berries on cookie sheet and put in moderate oven (325 F) until dry or in the sun. Watch out for birds! Berry Milk Punch
½ cup wild berry juice 1 quart of milk
juice from ½ lemon nutmeg
sugar or honey to taste
Add first three ingredients to milk and serve sprinkled with nutmeg
Coming soon! A new Craighead website, digital home of all things Craighead, is under constuction.
Web Help Wanted ... Craighead House needs a person (or persons) to help us maintain our website and social media links. Our soon-to-be-debuted new website will need someone who can work with committee chairs and board members. This is not a big job – several hours a month should be adequate. The pay is nonexistent, but our gratitude would be enormous! If interested, please contact CraigheadHouse@gmail.com
COVID-19 Nixes Programs, AGAIN!
Though the progression of COVID-19 infections in Cumberland County has diminished, orchestrating a safe environment for families to participate in meaningful programs, even outdoors, was not possible. So, unfortunately the planned read-aloud and sensory activities schedule involving Jean Craighead George’s books will be saved for future use.
Please watch our website for updates on re-scheduling programs and for an announcement of possible fall events that will hopefully include a trail walk, noted earlier in this issue. Naturally, our plans will evolve around the status of community health.
We, and our new "watch pigeon", miss seeing our friends by the Yellow Breeches.*
Thank you for your patience and stay well!
* She/he might prefer the name White Rock Dove. I just call her JEAN!
History Follows Old Iron Highways Expansion of the iron ore industry at Pine Grove Furnace and elsewhere allowed John Weakley Craighead to negotiate a mile-long right-of-way through Craighead land with the South Mountain Railroad (SMRR) so it could connect with the then Cumberland Valley Railroad (CVRR) in Carlisle.
“They paid John Weakley $6,000, $1.095 per linear foot or $576,000 in 2010 dollars, a princely sum for 1868.” (1)
The South Mountain and Gettysburg & Harrisburg lines merged July,1891. The ride from Craigheads to Carlisle
was approximately four and one have miles. Exact fare is unknown, but 2 – 3 cents per mile was the State guideline.
(Our thanks to Randy Watts for this information.)
1 Benjey, Tom. 2016. Glorious Times: Adventures of the Craighead Naturalists. p27. Missoula: University of Montana Press.
